The Diamond Age
The focus being on character development and conversation and scenes shows you might be a fan of soft sci fi. Thats OK. Different strokes, different folks, etc. The only real problem Diamond Age has from a hard sci fi perspective, is its 20 years old and everyone knows about additive manufacturing and 3-d printing and slicing objects to be printed and feedstock issues and compiling and analog analogies to digital logic gates and compilers and natural language processing and the dangers of closed source, the idea of more or less tablet computing and wikipedia rolled into one. Its all…
What I always appreciated with Neal Stephenson is the level of nerdy detail in his books. It's what makes re-reading his books very enjoyable. Which is something I do every few years or so. Gibson's Neuromancer is often recommended as a thing to read next. But to me that's a very different type of book. Basically, Gibson uses a lot of word soup to create a futuristic vibe and mood but in the end it's just a stylistic thing rather than a coherent view of the future and at this point it's a bit dated. As a vision it was all a bit dystopian and cool at the time. But not very…
Hmmm. Tequila (Nell's mother) vanishes which is weird (it's plot necessary, but in reading and re-reading I don't think she's even firmly written out, she just vanishes) But the other recipients of the Primer both do something it's just that this novel isn't about them, indeed maybe the point is that their paths diverge so enormously. Princess Nell is exactly what Nell intended from the get go. We don't see Elizabeth and Fiona's first interactions with the Primer, it seems safe to assume they do not begin by escaping from a terrible castle since their lives are comfortable and there's…
Agreed. I guess that's one gap between the rich and the poorest that will always be hard to bridge. If we could adapt some concepts to helping kids thru a government program, it could still be pretty cool to think about allocating even a small % of what we spend on military procurement to maybe go into giving AI tablets to every child that taught the most basic stuff like healthy diet, keeping a personal budget, how to learn about elections and vote in them, etc., and give the kids access to creator tools too in a way where it's in the Start Menu or whatever but not forced upon them. That…
Snow Crash must feel really dated in 2024 so I don't recommend starting with that book. Diamond Age is a fairly accurate description of the present and a possible near future, but somehow written in the 90s. We aren't choking on nanite dust and still haven't quite gotten 3d printers to the level described in the book but the Neo-Victorian social stratification is on track and machine learning is transforming education in ways hinted at in the book. What are you missing? His books that take place in the present or the future are thought experiments focused around the ways technology can…
I'm a parent that just taught my 4yo preschooler to read. So I'm not really your target user, but I watched the walkthrough and read the website, and here are my reactions. Hopefully something here is useful for you: - I'm honestly baffled by spending so much time on one book (program?) in a classroom context. I imagine some kids won't be interested in the particular story, but it will go on for an entire month. I could see this damaging interest. - The pace seems incredibly slow. To learn to read, you need to read a lot. But this is one book per month? - The more stories a child is…
It mentions Tau Zero, but actually just how often are Bussard Ramjets invoked in SF stories? Where there's no travel over great distances (e.g. most Cyberpunk and other SF about what happens here in the near future) this doesn't come up at all. e.g. Diamond Age doesn't need a a way to do interstellar travel since the furthest anybody goes is an airship ride to Europe or America. Today's soft SF generally invokes some means of FTL travel (and so no practical mechanism needed) if the story will involve travel between solar systems, maybe it's wormholes, or there's a "warp drive" or that sort…
In Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, your position in society is reflected in part by the uniqueness of the goods you own. Poor people have lots of flashy, brand-name merchandise. Wealthy people, on the other hand, own things that are hand-crafted out of natural materials, often bespoke to them. News for the masses is flashy, digital, and tailored to the individual; news for the elites, the top of the top, comes printed on real paper, just like they did in the old days. It's not that the elites are Luddites, eschewing technology. Rather, it's a very subtle part of their lives, a hint of…
Reminds me of the Primer from Neal Stephenson's A Diamond Age. Passage from Nell's first experience with the Primer: The book spoke in a lovely contralto, with an accent like the very finest Vickys. The voice was like a real person's- though not like anyone Nell had ever met. It rose and fell like slow surf on a warm beach, and when Nell closed her eyes, it swept her out into an ocean of feelings. "Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and…
It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps. For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you with content pre-created by humans. Secondly, the illustrated primer had an expert understanding of human development, human psychology, and human biology. It used this…